Scripting a sophisticated RTS AI with Lua

Posted by T. Webster on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by T. Webster
Published on 2013-06-30T12:52:03Z Indexed on 2013/06/30 16:28 UTC
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ai

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scripting

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lua

I'm planning to develop a somewhat sophisticated RTS AI (eg see BWAPI). have experience programming, but none in game development, so it seems easiest to start by scripting the AI of an existing game I've played, Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War (2004). As far as I can tell, the game AI is scripted with some variant of Lua (by the file extension .ai or .scar). The online documentation is sparse and the community isn't active anymore.

I'd like to get some idea of the difficulty of this undertaking. Is it practical with a scripting language like Lua to develop a RTS AI that includes FSMs, decision trees, case-based reasoning, and transposition tables?

If someone has any experience scripting Dawn of War, that would also help.

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